Food Rules

Food Rules is a guide to everyday eating that the American food writer Michael Pollan wrote for general readers, originally titled Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. The book consists of an introduction and three main chapters, and offers 83 short, memorable rules for eating that require almost no nutritional knowledge to follow: what to eat, what kind of food to eat, and how to eat. The author's basic argument can be compressed into three sentences: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan has long studied the whole process of food from farm to table, and in this book he points out that many industrially processed edible substances on supermarket shelves are not real food. To this end he offers a series of plain criteria: don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food; don't eat anything with more than five ingredients; don't eat anything that has sugar or sweetener listed among the first few ingredients; don't eat anything whose name includes the words light, low-fat, or fat-free; eat only food that will eventually rot; avoid supermarkets as much as possible, and if you must go, avoid the central aisles of processed food and shop the perimeter. In the section on what kind of food to eat, he recommends a mostly plant-based diet, treating meat as a flavoring or an occasional indulgence, eating a colorful variety of vegetables and fruits, valuing fermented foods and small fish, drinking water as the best beverage, and regarding milk as a food rather than a drink. In the section on how to eat, he advocates eating when hungry, stopping before you are full, eating slowly, putting flowers on the table, avoiding meals alone as much as possible, having a glass of wine with dinner, and occasionally breaking the rules. The book is illustrated with line drawings, is short, and is suitable for dipping into or tearing out pages to stick on the refrigerator.